Entr'acte
by Eliza B. Welch
Summary: Rouge was tired of the story. A side note to "The Red Shadow".


Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue, don't ask, don't tell.

Note to readers: A little ficlet written for the second anniversary of my more popular fanfic, "The Red Shadow". I blame this all on the movie HP2 and eighth-grade English class. This ficlet takes place during "The Red Shadow", at a period I estimate to be between chapter 30 and 31. Let's hope I get that far.

"Entr'acte"

Rouge was tired of the story.

Hogwarts was rich with memories and stories, but this was just too much. It was always the same one nowadays, with all that had been going on. The one about the terrible monster, the horrible attacks on muggle-born students, the deadly heir... and the Chamber.

The Chamber of Secrets. Rouge had long ago stopped counting how many times she had heard the story. The fable. The myth. It seemed so very much a myth, the way the teachers told it. A ghost story conjured to frighten young children, the way the other students told it. But her papa... no. He told it like a war story, something that He took pride in, and something for the world to remember in fearful reverence. Just like Him.

But Rouge wanted them to tell something new, new stories for students to beg to hear around their common room's fire with wide, pleading eyes. New stories would be told; they just had to be completed first. But, for the moment, Rouge wanted to settle the old story in her mind, and reconcile the one still being written.

The tiny snake scratched on the side of one of the copper taps on the old, chipped sink glimmered at Rouge as she stared at it.

How long had that tiny snake lain there, undisturbed, waiting? Hundreds of years, waiting for the day that Hogwarts would change...

Snakes, the symbol of change and rebirth. Just as snakes shed their skin, Riddles have always shed their past lives.

Rouge sat on the cold, damp floor, leaning against the door to the stall in front of the sink, considering the tiny snake. She had tested the tap several times, trying to turn it on and off, but to no response, and that's when the scratched snake had caught her eye. She heard a series of watery, gurgling wails from within the toilet in the stall behind her, and guessed that she wasn't alone in the 'Out of Order' bathroom on the second floor, but she left the miserable ghost to her moping. She had other things to do.

Getting to her feet, Rouge approached the sink, her eyes fixed on the snake. Everything she had heard pointed to that tiny snake on that copper tap... there was only one way to find out if the stories were truthfully aimed after all.

"_Open up_," she commanded at the snake, but the words rang as a soft hiss against the stone walls of the bathroom. Immediately, the copper of the tap turned brilliant white, glowing hotly. The tap began to spin, 'round and 'round, and the sink began to sink right into the floor and out of sight. Where the sink stood against the wall, a large pipe was exposed, wide enough as though it was for the specific purpose of being used to slide down.

Rouge looked mildly surprised.

As though she had been meaning to all along, without the faintest doubt, she climbed into the pipe, and without hesitation or even a brief glance back, she climbed into the pipe and pushed herself down into the darkness.

Though the caliginous tunnel twisted and turned, this way and that, it still felt as though she was plummeting straight down.

__

Straight to hell, she idly mused as the damp air whipped her face, stealing the breath from her lungs.

The tunnel opened up and Rouge fell to the ground with a _'crunch'_. It was a long, narrow passageway made of stone and metal, dead and lifeless and aphotic. She slowly got to her feet and began the long trek down the passageway, each step making a sickening _'crunch'_ beneath her feet, sounding awfully like the crushing of bones, and – she looked down – it was. The mucid, waterlogged floor was littered with the aged, broken bones of small animals. The skulls of the rodents staring up at her with their dead, soulless eyes...

She walked on until she reached a wall of piled broken rock and she hesitated. She wanted to see what lay beyond it, farther down the Chamber, but how to get through...? Her cobalt eyes drifted until she found a gap in the wall, just large enough to climb through. Hmm. So the path wasn't exactly barred.

Her feet landed with another _'crunch'_ of bones beneath her after she had clambered through the gap, and looking up, her eyes met... green.

Vivid poisonous green.

At least twenty feet long, the giant, crumbling snakeskin lay in twisting, aged coils. Though the skin was obviously withering away, its color remained fresh and bright, contrasting with the dark grays of stone and pale blues and greens of water around the skin of the monster and the girl.

Rouge gave a start.

The monster was real... an honest-to-Salazar basilisk... the stories were _true_. Now she had seen the proof, but she wasn't done here. There was more to this than just proof.

She walked on, the ever-present _'crunch'_ of bone still under her feet, always there... She found herself glancing down at those broken skeletons... those shattered skulls... those soulless eyes... and she saw faces down there among the rodent bones.

She saw Cho, the hero of Gryffindor's heartthrob screaming, her pretty face bloody and smashed.

She saw the three faces of the three names on the list, innocent, undeserving, unknowing, their eyes half-mast in eternal sleep and blood trickling at their throats.

She saw so many down there, the innocent and the sinful, the deserving and the undeserving, the knowing and the unknowing. Death does not discriminate.

Her father did not discriminate in his undertakings, nor did he ever fail. He was like Death himself, inevitable and inescapable... she believed it.

But all those faces staring up at her among the broken, soulless skeleton eyes, Rouge imagined them crying, screaming, begging and pleading up to her to be saved from their fate. They were begging _her_.

And Rouge looked so calmly down at them all and whispered, "No."

She walked on, walking apathetically on the skeletons and faces beneath her. The passageway seemed endless, surrounded by cold, dark stone on every side, she turned again and again down the passage, following the tunnel so surely, so confident of what would lie ahead.

A wall of solid stone towered above her at the end of the winding passage, on which two entwined serpents were carved. Together they stared down at Rouge with those great emerald eyes, glinting with the shrewd ambition and malicious authority that were such Slytherin traits. Rouge saw them as the two of Slytherin blood who had come before her, the maker of the Chamber and the Slytherin who continued its purpose. And she felt unworthy, standing before them in the legendary Chamber under their forever staring and judging gazes in the Cimmerian gloom, clad in Gryffindor robes.

The presence of those two Slytherins was in those emerald eyes, alive through tradition, legend, and Rouge herself.

"_Open_," she pleaded, the word escaping her lips as a low hiss, and the serpents parted before her, the cracked halves of the wall sliding out of sight, bidding her come forth.

Rouge stared into the long Chamber as she walked forward, passing in and out of the shadows of the towering stone pillars on either side of her. The eyes of the carved serpents entwined around the pillars stared back at her through the green-tinted tenebrosity, watching her every echoed step down the Chamber towards the great statue at the end.

But the carcass of the Basilisk blocked her path, putrid, faded-green reptilian flesh decaying in the pools of water, slime, blood, and ink on the floor at the statue's feet. Its punctured eyes stared at her, the legendary monster now so harmless... just another victim, regardless of who it was controlled and led by, its dark blood staining the smooth Chamber floor...

Crouching at the edge of the pool, she dipped her long fingers of one hand in the dark liquid, the blood and ink coating her fingertips. So much blood... With her other hand, as though meaning to all along, she reached into the pocket of her robes and brought out a fistful of velvet-like rose petals, bloodred in colour. With her blood-coated fingers, she plucked one petal from her fist, staining the soft, delicate surface with blood.

Numbly loosening her fingers, she let the petal fall into the pool. Cho Chang.

She let another petal fall. The student's name who was first on the list.

And another petal. Second on the list.

And another. Third.

One petal still remained in her opened palm, and she thought of the girl who'd grown the rose that surrendered these petals. The fatherless girl who lived happily with her mother, the girl who was still innocent, undeserving, and unknowing.

She let the final petal fall among the others. Rouge Magie.

She turned her cobalt eyes up to the ancient stone face of Salazar Slytherin, all those judging, serpentine eyes staring back at her through his.

She had done what she was told. She had done what was expected of her. She had done what was wanted of her.

She turned away from all the eyes, the echoes of her steps accompanying her out of the Chamber, the life of Rouge Magie left behind her in the blood spilt in the name of purity, of power, of Slytherin.

She no longer had a reason to be unworthy to those judging stares.

As the two halves of the wall slid back into place behind her, she examined her fingers. They were still coated in blood. She turned to face the two entwined serpents, Salazar Slytherin and Tom Riddle alive in their emerald eyes. She reached up a single long finger and traced the shape of yet another serpent in blood on the wall.

She had signed her addition to the story. 'Twas yet another tale to be told.


End file.
